It should, but you’re going to have to have enough self-discipline from the very beginning to get yourself to class each week! If you end up enjoying karate so much that you work harder to complete your regular obligations on time so you can attend class, then that will have a positive effect on your self-discipline. If you decide that you want to improve your stamina for karate more than you want that extra jelly donut, you’ll be able to say that you’re becoming more self-disciplined.

Self-discipline describes a pattern of behavior that supports achieving a goal, particularly when the required behaviors are more difficult than what we’re naturally inclined to do or less pleasant than the behaviors we’ve chosen in the past. Achieving a goal is a progressive series of cause and effect relationships where the “cause” element is your own behavior.

Cause and effect relationships tend to be separated by a great deal of time in our everyday lives. If we don’t study hard in September, we fail a test in November. If we overeat for a couple weeks, we’ll find out later that we’ve put on ten pounds. In these two examples the consequences of bad choices and undesirable behavior are deferred, so the incentive to do the right thing isn’t as strong. In karate, cause and effect often happen within seconds of each other. We choose correctly or we don’t and the feedback is usually immediate. Having this concrete model to understand cause and effect can help students generalize the lessons of karate to their everyday lives, improving the choices they make and leading to a more self-disciplined character overall.